The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
BEN OKRIThis is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
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I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.
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Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
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We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
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You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
BEN OKRI